Tuesday, July 12, 2011

When the term "Gutter Press" is almost a compliment

The concept of ‘journalism’ was invented by Cro-Magnon man some 39,985 years ago in what would later be known as Europe. (citation needed) Grok Brightmoon was one the few witnesses to his tribal leader (Lakk Finebeard) sliding and ultimately tripping over a discarded piece of still moist boar flesh, and decided to draw a picture of it on his cave wall. Beneath this he wrote some undoubtedly hilarious satirical comment, but experts have been unable to translate this – although it’s believed in some circles to be one of the first recorded puns.

Cave dwellers flocked from miles around to see this fascinating cave scrawl, and Grok Brightmoon inadvertently began a trend. When Cro-Magnon man noticed that thanks to this cartoon Tribal Leaders were way more cautious and not tripping over moist boar flesh half as much as they used to, certain Cave Dwellers took to leaving it scattered around randomly in darkened caves and hiding behind nearby rocks, waiting for the unwary.

Cave Scrawls have been found dated from around this time with contrary opinions; Some of them claim how they have documented Shaman proof that falling over boar flesh is very bad for you, whereas some of them take the spin that everybody should at least try to slide over on boar flesh at least once a day for its positive health benefits. And one was even found blaming all the damn dropped boar flesh on African immigrants – even though it wasn’t even called Africa yet.

The process of journalism used to be a reactive one; something newsworthy happened and somebody was there to report it – the idea being to inform the citizenry. (“Lakk Finebeard fall on boar skin. Shaman take this as Bad Omen.” or “Cave floor bad place to store boar skin. Eating it after gives man mighty big bellyache and dung fallout”).

However, journalists as a group have somehow made an odd paradigm shift. Certain schools of journalism decided amongst themselves that, well, sometimes there just isn’t enough news to go around. Sometimes you just need to scatter those random boar skins to see who falls over. And sometimes, if you’re really unlucky, you get caught in the act of scattering those bear skins and make the news yourself.

Now, unless your only source of the news is through the impartial, fair output from Rupert Murdoch’s News International Ltd, you can’t help but have noticed that there have been two very major news stories about unscrupulous journalism over the past few weeks. If your only source of news IS from News International, you’re probably only aware of house prices going up and footballers having affairs. Odd that.

The first (which seems to have now vanished with the hullaballoo of the second) is regarding the Sun and Mirror newspapers being found guilty of contempt of court over the treatment over the arrest of Joanna Yeates landlord Christopher Jeffries. Both newspapers launched an absolutely scathing personal attack against Jeffries, finding him guilty of pretty much every crime throughout the entirety of history except for the crucifixion of Christ and the assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand. Being slightly eccentric and odd looking was all the Sun and Mirror needed to dig every little bit of dirt about this (and let’s not forget this important fact) man who was revealed to be innocent. The grubby little papers had all but convicted this man before the police ever did – and let’s be honest, couldn’t.

But that all pales into insignificance next to the frankly incredible revelations that we’ve had in the last week regarding the News Of The Worlds phone hacking scandal, which finally saw the destruction of the vile rag. Until it emerges like a shitty phoenix with the new name ‘The Sun on Sunday’, at any rate.

The Journalists have finally been identified as crossing the line - in actively impeding a police case by hacking the phone of Millie Dowler. Police had actively believed she was a missing person until her remains were found - because there was evidence that she was accessing her voice mail. Whereas all the time it was scum hacks activating said mail, and deleting messages from it in order to clear space for more to arrive. Utterly vile and quite beyond contempt.

Little by little more shock news is breaking revealing the illegal extents to which News International will go to for a story, a practice which appears to be rather more common that anybody had ever suspected.

Monitoring the situation from their hidden submarine base, Rupert Murdoch and his cohort Sideshow Bob have proudly declared how utterly shocked they’ve been by all the allegations. Sideshow Bob was so utterly horrified by the news that she’d somehow completely forgotten that it was her who’d requested and paid for the phone hacking in the first place, and that she’d paid police on numerous occasions for information.

Every day brings more news of the hideous depraved depths that these “people” will sink to in order to generate news, and the story will drag on for weeks, itself making headlines.

But probably not in The Sun or Times, eh?

A plea: Do something about it. Murdoch is fighting back to save the lucractive BSkyB deal - first he tried to con us all by the empty gesture of closing The News Of The World, and has now withdrew his proposed undertakings for Sky News, forcing the deal to be referred to the Competition Commission to buy time for the political temperature to cool. Click here and register your disgust.